Don Starts Daily Exercise Tracking
04/08/09
At the recent GamesBeat conference I heard several speakers talk about the importance of the social aspects of gaming. One such element of social gaming is the leaderboard, a roster of each player’s achievements or high scores in the game.
I’ll have to review my notes, but I recall someone saying that leaderboards are a big factor influencing player motivation. This concept obviously has implications for fitness gaming: my desire for leaderboard status might make me work out longer, hit higher calorie burn thresholds, or push my aching body harder (even though I’d rather not) just to improve my best time.
I decided to create my own leaderboard to chart my daily performance on the HeartRate Games bicycle game controller prototype. My goal is to see if tracking this information will improve my own exercise motivation. I will publish the information on this blog.
I’ll tell you a little bit about how I’m gathering information for the leaderboard.
The HeartRate Games prototype enables a player to pedal and steer their own bicycle through TORCS, an open-source car racing simulator. This is a great demo because we’ve taken a sedentary game and bolted our proprietary fitness gaming interface onto to the game code, thus turning it into a great fitness game that is super fun to play while riding a stationary bike. I rode it for 40 minutes today and could keep doing it longer because it’s a fun video game.
The screenshot below will give you an idea of what it looks like to play TORCS. Usually I’m playing with a view from slightly behind and above the car, but the TORCS website doesn’t have a good screenshot for this.
The leaderboard data I’m tracking is displayed in the upper left corner of the screen:
Here’s a closer view:
The challenging thing about playing this game on a bike is that you can’t rely on sheer physical output to increase your best track time. You have to get good at navigating the course in order to improve your best time. Go into a corner too fast and you’ll skid out or hit the wall. Go through it too slow and you’ll bleed off too much momentum and have to make it up with extra effort.
I track my speed on the speedometer at the bottom of the screen. I can’t really daydream or else I’ll go off the road or lose momentum. I’m getting better at knowing what the optimal speed is for each section of the track.
Because I’m riding my own bike I’m able to shift gears to maximize my efficiency. That helps me go faster, but only to a certain point, after which the limiter becomes my cardiovascular fitness.
So here’s today’s leaderboard. Three observations:
1. Shaving four one-hundredths of a second off of my best time required quite a bit of effort.
2. Publishing the leaderboard on this blog has been a big motivator. I cranked out an extra 20 minute ride and bettered my best time just so I could publish an extra ride’s worth of data today.
3. I don’t yet have a heartrate monitor, so I’m not tracking calories or pulse. I’ll pick one up and add this data to the leaderboard.
I’ll have to review my notes, but I recall someone saying that leaderboards are a big factor influencing player motivation. This concept obviously has implications for fitness gaming: my desire for leaderboard status might make me work out longer, hit higher calorie burn thresholds, or push my aching body harder (even though I’d rather not) just to improve my best time.
I decided to create my own leaderboard to chart my daily performance on the HeartRate Games bicycle game controller prototype. My goal is to see if tracking this information will improve my own exercise motivation. I will publish the information on this blog.
I’ll tell you a little bit about how I’m gathering information for the leaderboard.
The HeartRate Games prototype enables a player to pedal and steer their own bicycle through TORCS, an open-source car racing simulator. This is a great demo because we’ve taken a sedentary game and bolted our proprietary fitness gaming interface onto to the game code, thus turning it into a great fitness game that is super fun to play while riding a stationary bike. I rode it for 40 minutes today and could keep doing it longer because it’s a fun video game.
The screenshot below will give you an idea of what it looks like to play TORCS. Usually I’m playing with a view from slightly behind and above the car, but the TORCS website doesn’t have a good screenshot for this.
The leaderboard data I’m tracking is displayed in the upper left corner of the screen:
Here’s a closer view:
The challenging thing about playing this game on a bike is that you can’t rely on sheer physical output to increase your best track time. You have to get good at navigating the course in order to improve your best time. Go into a corner too fast and you’ll skid out or hit the wall. Go through it too slow and you’ll bleed off too much momentum and have to make it up with extra effort.
I track my speed on the speedometer at the bottom of the screen. I can’t really daydream or else I’ll go off the road or lose momentum. I’m getting better at knowing what the optimal speed is for each section of the track.
Because I’m riding my own bike I’m able to shift gears to maximize my efficiency. That helps me go faster, but only to a certain point, after which the limiter becomes my cardiovascular fitness.
So here’s today’s leaderboard. Three observations:
1. Shaving four one-hundredths of a second off of my best time required quite a bit of effort.
2. Publishing the leaderboard on this blog has been a big motivator. I cranked out an extra 20 minute ride and bettered my best time just so I could publish an extra ride’s worth of data today.
3. I don’t yet have a heartrate monitor, so I’m not tracking calories or pulse. I’ll pick one up and add this data to the leaderboard.